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Five Things PTC Creo Has Built Lately

Fri, 04/03/2015 - 08:15 — Anonymous

It’s hard to predict what PTC Creo might model next. The leading 3D CAD software sits in research, manufacturing, and educational settings worldwide, creating everything from kid’s toys to space robots. What has it done lately? Revived 3 classic motorcycle brands, turned a student into an inventor, and decorated the new terminal at Heathrow.

While the idea of re-creating any icon is daunting, Harley tackles the challenge with a rubber-mounted Twin Cam 103 engine mounted in a Dyna chassis that has a low 25.4-inch seat height and ergonomics designed to fit a broad range of riders.

Paul Weiss, lead engineer on the bike, explains: “We wanted the Low Rider to offer an expanded comfort envelope, and worked in three stages toward that goal. We started with live feedback from riders of all sizes, and then employed PTC Creo computer simulations of posture and riding positions to project the best positions for rider controls.”

Early reviewers are pleased:

Triumph and KTM make good, too.

Harley isn’t the only company experiencing a renaissance with the help of PTC solutions. Engineering and Technology Magazine noticed that both Triumph and KTM have come “back from the brink” in recent years. “Two major motorcycle brands came close to collapsing under financial pressure, but Triumph, through innovation, and KTM, through focusing on core competencies, have been resurrected,” writes the magazine.

At Triumph, careful attention to design and simulation helped get the iconic bike back on its feet. Here’s a peek into the company’s successful design process:

“It’s not until [physical prototyping] that you really see the final model and the senior manager will come around and decide on things they want to be changed,” says Ian Kistruck, design team leader of chassis engineering. “But it is now a solid model and it is a slow process to get the final refinement in. What we are trying to do now is to remove one of those solid steps whereby we take the process as far as we can in CAD, and then cut a finer model; basically, we are looking to cut out the clay stage.

“We want to be able to get it as close as we can in the CAD stage using PTC PTC Creo Simulate software, cut the final model and approve the final model as a prototype.”

We’ve featured KTM in this blog several times, but what you may not know is that, before the company was an industry leader, it filed for bankruptcy! Since those dark days of the 1990s, the company has come back strong with a visionary leadership team, passionate staff, and PTC Creo.

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Halifax county, Virginia, high school senior Chris Alverez took a drafting class hoping to learn to draw parts, says this story in the Gazette Virginian. But when a Marketing teacher asked him to help figure out how to stabilize the department’s video camera, Alvarez quickly became an inventor. Using PTC Creo and a 3D printer, he produced the CometCam for his “client.”

“When walking upstairs the camera usually shakes, but when using the ‘CometCam’ you do not have to worry about the camera shaking,” says Alveraz.

Read more about how the CometCam works and what engineering problem Alveraz plans to attack next (hint, it involves bicycle wheels) by reading the full article.

And finally, light into fishes.

Emergence is a spectacular light sculpture installed last summer at London Heathrow Terminal 2 above the tony Caviar House & Prunier restaurant. A total of 13 meters wide and weighing 1.5 tons, the carbon fiber structure integrates 350,000 LEDs to create an effect inspired by fish swimming.

“Polar Manufacturing was commissioned by Cinimod Studio, which designed the sculpture and specialize in the fusion of architecture and lighting design,” reads this article in Engineering Capacity. “Polar designed the tooling using PTC Creo 3D modelling software. All the tooling design, machining and making the parts took just seven weeks.”

To find out more about how the sculpture was developed and delivered (it’s more complicated than you might think), read the article. But first, watch the video. The results are mesmerizing!